Felt a bit rough after my few leaving do (I'm such a lightweight!), so it was perhaps a good thing that the weather was so miserable on Sat 9th.
Sunday was a much nicer day, but the forecast was for strong winds later. I headed up to the airport anyway and after some indecisive dithering decided to practice some crosswind landings before the wind got too strong. For the first circuit the wind was 230/13 kts on runway 32 - that's 100% crosswind. Got bounced around a bit but made a passable landing. However on the secons ATC informed me the wind was 230/18 kts up to 29 kts. The crosswind limit on the Cessna 177 is 15 kts so this was, ahem, somewhat over the limit. Carried on as the wind had been very variable and got bounced around a lot more and at about 200ft called in that this was now to land rather than touch and go. Dreadful landing but was happy to be down and to be calling it a day.
Monday the weather was good if breezy. Decided to do the long intended trip down to Spanhoe which is about 1/2 a mile from my parents house. Left the zone via Dewsbury and tracked down to Totley (south-east Sheffield), then on to Belvoir Castle near Grantham though my heading & altitude holding wasn't the best (need to work on it for the CPL). Cottesmore radar asked me to route in to Spanhoe via Melton Mowbray which was fine since I'd just become visual with the castle so it didn't mess up my plog too much. Flew over the tip of the bottom arm of Rutland Water and almost immediately spotted the grass runway 14/32 which stood out verywell in the surrounding trees and wasteland. Standard overhead join while talking to Cottesmore since Spanhoe has no radio, and while I got a little too low over the forest in the circuit, the landing was perfect which I was very pleased about as a first visit to this airfield!
After some lunch with the folks did my mass & balance checks and checked my TODR/LDR to ensure it was safe to take off and land there with 3 POB and half a tank of fuel. No problems, so off we went, getting back on the radio to Cottesmore shortly after lift off and then heading back up past Rutland Water to Melton Mowbray again. Then turned south to fly past Rockingham Motor Speedway before routing to Peterborough to try spot my sister's house. Returning to Spanhoe approaching from the south the cirsuit was better, but sadly the landing was not as good being a little firm and bit sideways having not removed the crab quick enough. Still, my parents really, really enjoyed it (much more so than I expected) and weren't fazed by the iffy landing.
Had some tea and then headed back the way I came. The heading and altitude holding was better on the way back and I navigated and judged my start of descent into the Leeds zone well. The landing was a bit iffy, again not removing all the crab and landing a bit sideways and not having enough into wind aileron - definately need to work on crosswind landings :-(
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